The New Nation - Internet Edition

Dr. M. Tamim Ahmed, Special Assistant of the Chief Adviser for Power and Energy, the other day hinted that the government was thinking to raise fuel and gas prices in view of the intermittent rise of petroleum in the international market. Rise of petroleum and gas prices again shall mean an inadvertent effect on industry, agriculture, transport and communication and household life.

This, in simpler term, means that the entire life cycle of the nation shall undergo a jerk which it hardly has the capacity to absorb. Internationally, fuel oil price has soared from USD 90 to 140 over only last two months and a half. With it the price of rice and other cereals have been doubled globally. In the language of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winning American economics professor, "food and energy markets are increasingly integrated". The cost of fuel for running machines and vehicles and the cost of food to keep human bodies warm and workable have been related inseparably so that the developing world hardly gets any elbowing space. The cost of fuel is rising and it may not be available after 50 years. So for the developed world some experimentation was needed to be done, and it was done by attempting to produce biofuel with the help of foodgrains with their straws. Thus ethanot was produced which is cheaper than mineral fuel and consequent upon that price of fuel and price of food both went high leaving man unfed and machine uncoiled. How all these curses befell and who is instrumental to it?

Professor Stiglitz wrote in a recent article, "Two factors set off today's crisis: the Iraq war contributed to the run up in oil prices, including through increased instability in the Middle East, the low cost provider of oil, while biofuels have meant that food and energy markets are increasingly integrated". Prof. Stiglitz, like all other scrupulous persons, welcomes renewable energy source(s) but does not at all concede to any programme that deprives poor people from food. He puts it thus,

"Although the focus on renewable energy sources is welcome, policies that distort food supply are not." But the US under Bush and some European countries have ventured in the dangerous experiment of biofuel production puffing millions of 'Third World' people to the threat of starvation. Biofuel production has another anti-people syndrome--heavy subsidy is given to American and European agriculture on the plea of humanitarian consideration. If cereals and plantations are used for producing ethanol the benefit of subsidy in agriculture goes to the fuel businessmen's coffer, argued Prof. Stiglitz in which he is hundred per cent correct. So, this experimentation must be stopped.

Agricultural subsidy has a different developing world aspect. Individual and multilateral donors earlier used to permit 17 per cent of their loans and grants as agricultural subsidy. But these day they have reduced it to just 3 per cent. This intriguing reduction has put third world farmers and governments in serious trouble. This policy needs to be immediately revised.

Bush's domestic policy has put the Americans into trouble. Economic analysts say the US for the last one year or so has been facing the worst recession in its history after the 1930s. Houses have remained unsold, unemployment and under-employment have widened and the price level of essential items have soared several percentage points. Consequently, inflation has reached to a point which the economy can hardly absorb. Bush, by his aggressive and erroneous domestic and global policies has put Americans and the world people at large in danger.

When time has come for his presidency to end, Bush is thinking of plunging the world into another war with terrible consequences. The problem with President Bush is his obsession with America's military might. The world must shun him and his aggressive policies.